10. Secularization in Practice
10. Secularization in Practice
The secularization of British national life is a complex process of which you and I, willy-nilly, are part, and to focus it for study is not easy. The following factors, however, are certainly major elements in what is going on.
1. A Drift From the Churches.
Apart from some well-heeled white-collar suburban areas and some nondormitory villages of the Ambridge type, this drift is countrywide, though it is more pronounced in England and Wales than in Scotland. In many working-class population areas, "drift" would be the wrong word, for people there have never been churchgoers since the first houses were put up—often more than a hundred years ago. As today people who move to new housing estates and high-rise flats often lose any churchgoing habits they had before, so it was in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when families moved from the country to work in factories and mills.
The nonavailability of churches has sometimes been blamed for this, but it was due more perhaps to the pressures and claims of the industrial way of life. There are still very few blue-collar industrial workers in the Protestant churches, which in view of the present size of our industrial population— something over half the country's total work force—is a daunting fact indeed. In this century, though the total population of Britain has increased by more than half, all indigenous Protestant bodies, including the two national churches, have been in decline numerically so far as active membership is concerned, and the Roman Catholic Church seems to maintain its strength only through immigration. Whereas on a Sunday in 1851, when an unofficial census was taken, one in three Englishmen went to a place of worship (a proportion which at the time was felt to be terribly low), the number on an ordinary Sunday in 1974 is no higher than one in seven and is more likely to approximate to one in ten or twelve.9
2. A Drift From Christian Knowledge.
Whether there is less real, as distinct from formal, Christianity in Britain today than there was fifty or a hundred years ago is something which only God knows. But many have observed that, whereas until recently most people carried with them a smattering of Bible knowledge, the young people of today reveal by and large a striking lack of such knowledge. While more popular Christian books are produced, bought and presumably read in Britain today than ever before, and while the Bible holds its place among the bestsellers, the circle touched by Christian literature does not seem to enlarge much, if at all. Outside this circle public interest in Christianity has sunk to such a low ebb that casual knowledge about it no longer brushes off on the uncommitted in the way that it once did, and in the way that casual knowledge about, say, pop singers and the football leagues brushes off today on people who have no personal interest in either. Christianity has ceased to be a matter of general knowledge and become a private concern which those whose interest is not caught up by it just ignore.
3. A Shift From Public Christian Commitment. We are moving from the ethos of a Christian state and society to the ethos of its secular counterpart. What this means may be seen from two small books, T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and D. L. Munby's The Idea of a Secular Society (1963).
Eliot sought to revive the ideal of "Christendom" in a modern context. Defining a Christian society as a community of "men whose Christianity is communal before being individual,"10 he looked for a Christian elite (a "clerisy," that is, a body of committed churchmen, ordained and lay) who would penetrate society at every level and leave no area of life without its ideological guardians. "The clerisy he intended, somewhat like a social class, or more precisely an intellectual class, a meritocracy," writes Leslie Paul, "would share not so much a common political programme as common (Christian) values and creeds and a common feeling for the dimensions of the sacred in the secular world."11 They would leaven the social lump to the extent of maintaining a Christian public opinion and a general readiness publicly to uphold Christian standards.
Munby wrote against this, protesting that nowadays such an ideal is not merely impractical but actually undesirable, and that the goal for Christians to aim at is rather that of a secular society founded on respect for the variety of individuals and therefore on tolerance for all views which are not in a direct way socially disruptive. Here is Lesslie New-bigin's summary of the six features which according to Munby will mark such a society:
"(i) It 'refuses to commit itself as a whole to any particular view of the nature of the universe and of the place of man in it.' In such a society the views of atheists and of Christians will be equally respected, and will be given equal opportunity to influence education, broadcasting and other aspects of public life. Such a society will therefore not approve any state recognition of religion.
"(ii) A secular society will be a pluralist society in the sense that it will not enforce (whether by social pressure or state regulation) 'a uniform attitude in important matters of human behaviour and values.' It will thus accept the fact that education 'will be as much a sphere of divided beliefs and cultures as any other realm of life.
"(iii) A secular society will be a tolerant society. It will . . . give the benefit of the doubt to deviant belief and conduct.
"(iv) The organisations and institutions of a secular society will have strictly limited aims," (namely, to provide facilities without giving directives). . . . "A secular society deflates the pretensions of politicians and judges to be leaders of society or 'prophet-priests of the national conscience.' " (Any such pretensions on the part of Christians were ruled out earlier, under (i) ).
"(v) A secular society will solve its problems by collecting and analysing the relevant facts so that people may be able to make rationally the decisions necessary to enable them to achieve their desires; it will not try to tell people what their desires ought to be.
"(vi) A secular society will be a society without 'official images.' 'If there are no common aims, there cannot be a common set of images reflecting the common ideals and emotions of everyone. Nor can there be any common ideal types of behaviour for universal application.' "12
Munby's pipe dream is vulnerable from several standpoints. First, if practicability is the issue, it is impracticable in a much profounder sense than Eliot's; for whereas Eliot's problem would be simply to find enough Christians who have got what it takes to fulfil his aims, Munby's problem would be to find a way of holding together a society which has no unifying or motivating goal and no agreed moral basis save the one belief that centrifugal individuality should be given its head. But to enthrone so socially disintegrative a belief to be the principle of society's cohesion would be a guarantee of social disaster. Has Munby not heard of original sin, nor learned from the Bible and world history what happens when every man does what is right in his own eyes?
Moreover, nature abhors an ideological vacuum no less than a physical one, and history suggests that the morally unqualified tolerance which Munby seems to want, and which some have seen as one dimension of decadence,13 will sooner or later produce by reaction some kind of ideological dictatorship, which will be accepted with hardly a struggle because men will feel that any unit-ive communal goal is better than none.
Second, Munby seems to have hold of the wrong end of his own stick; as David Edwards points out, what his arguments really defend is "not the 'secular society' but the 'pluralist' or 'open' society. On Mr. Munby's showing the state, not the society, needs to be secular."14
Third, the biblical insistence that all life and all power, including political power, is from God and for God surely obliges Christians to seek a society in which the true God is acknowledged, and approved standards come as close as possible to the behavior pattern that God has prescribed as being both pleasing to him and beneficial to us. To settle for a society which has no standards save unlimited tolerance is not to love one's neighbor, but to fail to love him. To secure his right to reject the Christian way if he feels he must is indeed a Christian duty (Munby is correct there), but to work for (rather than strive against) a state of affairs which will make that rejection easier, by taking from Christianity all its present backing in public opinion (which is what Munby's preferred option really amounts to), would be a betrayal of both God and man.
But we must rein in our horses. The purpose of reviewing Eliot and Munby was not to make a case for one view against the other, but to clarify our understanding of what a public Christian commitment, or lack of it, involves, as a preparation for trying to estimate how far the public Christian commitment of former days has been given up in our present-day British society; and to this we must now briefly turn.
Have we a secular state in Britain? Yes and no. As early as 1913, when the English state was definitely "Church of England" and Free Churchmen were still seen as lapsed Anglicans, J. N. Figgis argued, in The Churches and the Modern State, that the state's task was to "hold the ring" for all churches, securing their legal protection and freedom to function but not committing itself to any one of them. Though the formalities of the Establishment remain, the state today has in practice moved nearer to Figgis's recommended position.
Under synodical government Parliament is not now asked, nor would it any longer be willing, to settle the affairs of the Church of England (though this is only to say that the two national churches, north and south of the border, are now in practice on a par at this point). Bishops still speak as representative churchmen in the House of Lords, but Christian principles and Church opinion seem to have little or no effect on legislative programs. Yet the state is not anti-Christian or anti-Church in any active way, as it is for instance in communist countries. Though maintaining a formally uncommitted stance, it may fairly be described as still a fellow traveller with the Church. In education, broadcasting and television a measure of Christian privilege still remains, and the part played by the Church on ceremonial occasions (providing official chaplaincies, leading in prayer and worship, and so on) is still evidently welcomed.
"Surveys of public opinion," wrote David Edwards in 1969, "show that the privileges are not in fact widely resented. The great majority of English parents seem to want religious worship and instruction in schools, and religious broadcasts have large audience. . . . Some evidence that the British people wishes to observe high standards of decency and compassion comes in its acceptance of the legal prohibition of public prostitution and racial discrimination."15
All this seems still to be true. Public appeal to our Christian heritage can still be made, though modern politicians usually leave it to others to make it. The welfare state embodies recognizably Christian ideals of care, and recognizably Christian ideals of respect for the rights and conscience of the individual, plus the traditional Christian scheme of social values still animate the British judicial system. Thus it would seem that the British state, though secularized to a degree, is not yet wholly secular; more of its Christian roots remain than might at first be thought.
Have we, then, a secular society on our hands? Again no categorical answer can be given. On the debit side, it is clear that in matters of personal morality—honesty, sexual restraint, fidelity, thrift, self-control, public spiritedness, responsible gratitude, and such things—a great deal of the Christian tradition of teaching, and the public opinion that went with it, has been eroded, so that there are many young Britons today to whom it has simply never occurred, nor ever been seriously suggested, that the practice of these virtues might be part of the good life.
Statistics show that crime (especially crimes of violence), illegitimacy and venereal disease, drug offenses and outlay on gambling (not to mention tobacco, drink or installment buying), are increasing all the time: though in America these things are worse. Also, a great deal of dehumanizing thought about personal life (sometimes called humanist, sometimes not) has been pumped out, and has presumably made some converts, in recent years. It is notable, however, that when Os Guinness set out to analyze this array of ideas (in The Dust of Death, 1973) he went for most of his examples to America and continental Europe, where the ideas have been developed in more radical and forceful ways than here.
Similarly, the current revival of interest in the occult among those on whom Christianity has no hold (a predictable development, since nature abhors a religious vacuum no less than any other sort) is a sad sign, no doubt, but there is more of it in some other countries. Leslie Paul has solid warrant for his generalization about the pessimistic, nihilistic trend of modern literature— "whatever the philosophies and ideologies say, literature testifies that man seeks in vain, outside his moments of orgasm, for meaning, hope, or identity”16—yet it is again notable that his most striking evidence for this thesis comes from writers outside Britain. On the credit side, it is clear that Britain has still a very potent legacy of Christian ethical ideals for personal conduct, often linked with a continuing belief, however misshapen, in God and in the ultimate significance of morality.
The conclusion seems to be that though no public Christian commitment now marks our society we have not yet sunk so deep into the post-Christian void as some other communities have done. In the world of ideas, strongly anti-Christian currents run; but the British people in general do not take them with full seriousness. What will happen tomorrow nobody knows, but this seems to be where we are today.
4. A Detaching of Moral Values From Their Anchorage in Christian Faith.
What we see today is a secularizing of ethics. This is the other side of the picture sketched in the last two paragraphs. Certainly, Christian moral attitudes and behavior patterns still survive in circles where Christian faith is no longer present to give them sanction; but how long can they last under those conditions? High-minded humanists who value the Christian code of loving one's neighbor think it can last indefinitely on its own merits, because (they say) it clearly makes for human happiness. Christians wonder if this is not too starry-eyed. How long will a sense of human dignity survive after man's creation in God's image has been forgotten? Or a spirit of care and mutual service survive among men who forget the obligation to serve God? How long before Christian toleration, which was based on respect for God's image in man, will turn, as in some quarters it is already doing, into a total permissiveness based simply on hedonism—"living for kicks"? How soon will our heritage of Christian ideological capital run out? How long will God's common grace restrain sin in a community that has given up the faith in him that it once professed? In the Bible, self-destruction through lawless self-indulgence is one form of divine judgment on erring communities: may this be what we now face?17 These questions are easier to ask than to answer: but it is at least clear that while Christian morality, personal and social, lacks the sanctions of Christian faith it is constantly at risk.